🚀 go-pugleaf

On Jan 20, 2004, at 7:54 PM, Olav Kvern wrote:

> It really depends on how you're doing the sort. If you're finding 25K 
> text objects and sorting them with a bubble sort, then be prepared for 
> a long wait.

For sure.

> If you're sorting 25K *strings*, then it's up to AppleScript (and I 
> think it would go rather quickly).

There's no built-in AS sort, though. Depending on the strings, you 
could use "do shell script" and a Unix sort, but there are issues there 
with the length of the data returned (which I think can be solved by 
writing to a file). And that also potentially involves encoding issues 
of Mac Roman v Unicode, which might or might not affect your data.

But if you're not doing it often, there are AS sort routines around 
that aren't massively slow. It sounds like a matter of minutes won't 
matter too much in your greater scheme of things.

> Also, look around--there may be a scripting extension that does 
> exactly the sort of search you want. Check macscripter.net.

A good place to start, although I can't think of any. Shell scripting 
has put a fair old dent in the scripting addition business.

> Shane may also have suggestions...

There have been numerous discussions on this topic over the years both 
on Apple's AppleScript mailing list and the Dartmouth MACSCRPT mailing 
list. Both are searchable, I think, and would be good places to start.

--
Shane Stanley <sstanley@myriad-com.com.au>